AUBURN — Almost a year after 200 million gallons of oil started spewing into the Gulf of Mexico, tangible evidence of the spill is harder to find than it was last summer, when gooey tarballs ruined vacations and made national news.

So where did all the oil go? Monty Graham, senior marine scientist at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, said answering that complex question to a skeptical general public has been one of the biggest challenges faced by scientists in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

“The public goes, ‘Where did 200 million gallons of oil go? Did it just disappear?’” Graham said Friday in an address to students at Auburn University. “It creates angst with the public.”

Graham’s speech to about 200 young graduate students at the Southeastern Ecology and Evolution Conference dealt with how scientists engage the public in the midst of a crisis.

The answer to the question of the oil is that much of it has evaporated, dissipated or otherwise soaked up by both natural and artificial means.

Some of the efforts may have been wasteful, futile or naive, Graham said. But for the majority of the oil, it was: directly recovered from the well head; skimmed from the surface; burned; beached; volatilized (evaporated or aerosolized); chemically dispersed; or sedimented.

Those answers aren’t always satisfying to a public or media that demand an oil spill narrative that fits neatly with the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989.

As a result, some of the cleanup efforts were “driven by things other than science,” Graham said. “It was driven by agencies and corporations, and scientists were sidelined.”

He showed a photo of men wearing protective garb picking up tarballs on the beach as a bikini-clad woman sunbathed nearby.

“The inmates were running the asylum,” he told the audience to laughter. “Most of the (workers in the photo) are probably prisoners. Literally.”

Graham said he didn’t want to paint an overly rosy view of the oil crisis — “There’s no such thing as a good oil spill,” he said — but said he and other scientists had taken unfair criticism for being insufficiently alarmist about the impact of the spill.

He pointed to this month’s news about dead baby dolphins washing up on shore. The real story was more nuanced than dolphins simply being poisoned by oil, he said.

“All eyes are on the oil spill, and people are looking for toxicity,” he said. “It’s important to look for not just toxicity, but other things.”

When an Internet site picked up the Press-Register story on the dolphins, the headline read, “BP-funded scientists: Cold water killed baby dolphins.”

“It’s like someone taking a knife and stabbing you,” Graham said. “There are hundreds of scientists that are in the same boat as me. I can guarantee you, 99 percent of the scientists who are doing science around this oil spill are going to have done it with some money from BP.”

That was the question he left Friday for the group of aspiring scientists. How would they handle their jobs in the midst of a crisis? Would they accept money if they believed it was imperative for the science, even if it damaged their credibility in the public? How would they communicate vital science to decision-makers if there were no time for peer-review?

While students debated the answer, Graham had a message: Be prepared for skepticism.

“We can’t get mad at people for asking questions,” he said. “We can only get mad at ourselves.”